Apple grabs AMD Trinity genius John Bruno

Apple has quietly hired ex-AMD engineer John Bruno, the man responsible in no small part for the Trinity APU. Bruno is now “System Architect at Apple” according to a recent update to his LinkedIn profile, though the exact nature of his role at the Cupertino company has not been detailed. Still, there’s no shortage of potential speculation as to what the chip expert could be doing.

Bruno was at graphics card manufacturer ATI before it was acquired by AMD, but left the company after the sweeping job cuts at the chip firm back in November 2011. AMD cut 10-percent of jobs in an attempt to save money, with some significant losses in expertise; as well as Bruno, several other processor experts left to take up SoC roles with Samsung and other firms.

At Apple, Bruno is likely to be taking up similar reins as he managed at AMD. That could be part of Apple’s rumored progress working on its own processors for mobile and desktop; the company has already pushed ahead with its Apple Ax range of ARM-based chips for phones and tablets, and long-standing rumors suggest the company is also planning to shift its desktop line of MacBooks and Macs onto ARM silicon at some point too.

Even if that’s not Bruno’s initial focus, his expertise in multi-core processors such as AMD’s innovative APU should serve Apple well for future products wanting to deliver superlative graphics performance alongside solid battery life. There’s more on what APUs like Trinity can do here.